Originally Posted by Dreadnaut
I said that TGWW should exit this thread, and I meant it, however I had planned on responding to this post before I exited the thread and forgot too.
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If you meant it, then you should have acted upon it. Preaching about locker-room dynamics after an 'anonymous' source passes you a recording is clearly trying to infuriate my members, as sort of a 'passing-shot' as this conversation is supposed to die down.
I have no apology for you about how my players, in the moment of a loss and privately in conversation, reacted to the loss with each other. This was a private conversation, and this was venting. The passion they bring to competition is clear on the recordings, and I can understand the anger and frustration that they had. Their feelings and frustrations are their own. How we deal with that is an internal matter. Moreover, these do not represent the broader reaction within our community coming out of the loss nor the attitude of MERC leadership. Indeed, it has been a really energizing experience with some lessons that we learned from it.
To state the fact, we had a member take it into his own hands to continue to express his anger via this forum. Again, while I understand his frustrations with the situation, he is not speaking on behalf of MERC when he has posted as he too was inflammatory to this issue.
This is the only statement you will get from myself or MERC leadership on recordings of personal conversations, and of our member that was out of line in posting on forums.
Next, I understand that you believe your community of pilots across all factions constitutes the TGWW outfit. However PS2 communities are generally built around a singular faction, loyal to a certain team, one that they play continually with. This to me does not mean "play[ing] all over the place, regardless of tag ...shar[ing] many Teamspeak servers freely, bouncing from one to the other as situation warrants." And while we have numerous players including myself that will play all factions and with different groups, especially our best fliers, that does not mean by association these outfits and friends are all a part of the MERC community. So while we had offers of numerous friends and great players that are connected broadly to our community, it was our choice to follow what we believe to be the spirit of the rule and use only players directly in our outfit, that are core to our outfit, that primarily play our faction.
Now, it has been made clear that our groups differ in what we believe constitutes an outfit and community in this game for competitive play. I was concerned and knew about the situation of non-outfit members being added directly before the match, but we went into the match without raising an issue.
This issue of what constitutes an outfit is what MERC wanted clarification on after the match from the RCCC group holding these events for the future. While I too believe that a 30-day rule would be better then a 7-day rule, they have now been clear as to what the rule is. This is a positive outcome from all this mess.
People can still game the honour system (e.g. create a character on TEST server with an outfit member's name while really being a ringer), I would ask members of those outfits if they really want to be a part of a community that is willing to gut itself in order to look better for broadcasts. After all, ringers like that will only play on your side until you lose, and where will that leave you?
We went forward in the competition despite our concerns of outfit membership and the (sudden to me despite being a leader) change to spawn beacons. We did so because this is an event put on in the free time by the RCCC with PSU support. The CC is an evolving thing and I respect what they are doing with it. I had a lot of fun participating, but I believe that asking for clarification on rules is important to helping improve it. I also know that my outfit members really enjoyed it as well despite the loss, and indeed it would be something that we would like to participate with again in the future.
Finally, to address the talk about skill-level differences in this match. I believe what you saw in the NNG/TGWW vs TXR/MERC match was not a huge difference in skill levels as a whole, but a decision that we as TR leaders made with regards to air resources at the start of the match which given the map, resources and spawn options spiraled out of control. NNG & TGWW capitalized on that mistake, and should be commended for that, and for executing their plan extremely well. They have every right to be proud of that in this win. However, despite the lead in the first half, the starved resources, and issues spawning there was a period of time that TXR/MERC kept it close in the second half. So we have a single data point to judge and compare, and NNG/TGWW certainly won that one. But I believe that this one match though is not indicative of either TXR or MERCs potential, and I look forward to our future matches.
TL;DR: private conversations deserve to remain private, MERC accepts the clarification by RCCC to the rules regarding what makes a team, MERC congratulates NNG/TGWW for the win, MERC will continue to compete in the future.